[Kde-pim] KMail: discussion on mechanism of Identity selection when composing

[Alexis Papadopoulos]

Hello,

I've been using KMail for a couple of months now and despite some difficulties 
in the beginning (the approach being slightly different from the other mail 
clients I've used) I'm very satisfied with it.

Anyway, I got the hand of it but I'm still troubled by a couple of things, one 
of them being Identities. Other clients tend to have one identity per 
receiving account. What are the benefits in separating these two things ?

This approach has some drawbacks imho:
_ If I'm viewing a mail where my e-mail address does not appear in the headers 
(say like for a mailing-list), there is no way for the composer to set the 
appropriate identity when I hit the reply button, so the default one is used
_ When I hit "compose new mail", the identity is always to set to the default 
one. While this seems natural enough, I tend (and this is just a personal 
opinion !) to think that the Thunderbird way is more appropriate. It 
basically sets the identity to the currently viewed account in the folder 
list. (If say I have a receiving account named "RecvAcct1" with mail address, 
me at recvacct1.net), and I'm viewing the INBOX of this account, hitting new 
mail will set the identity to the one related to me at recvacct1.net. OK, that's 
not very clear, but hopefully you understood me.
_ What I don't find very natural is that for each receiving account I wish to 
add, I'm more or less obliged to create a new identity. This is done so that 
the FROM header is set accordingly to my outgoing mails, but also for the 
OpenPGP settings that might differ from one account to another.

Basically these issues can be solved by allowing the user to create a 
link/relation between an identity and a receiving account. 

If you consider the first issue in the list above, when I reply to a message 
that arrived in my recvacct1.net account, and although my e-mail address does 
not appear in the headers, KMail will now which Identity I wish to use for 
it. (This can now be mended with filters, simply by setting the 
X-KMail-Identity header to the appropriate identity upon retrieval of mails, 
but it seems more of a hack to me)

Could you please tell me what is your opinion on that matter ? Have I missed 
something here which might explain/solve these issues I'm having ? Have there 
been any similar thoughts in the past ?

Thanks in advance for your comments,
acp
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